Understanding how dogs react to every situation

       Dogs are a reactive animal. They live in the moment based on what is going on
, they don't day dream about the past wishing they were back in your parent's pool a few weeks ago or live in the future about when they're going back to your parent's pool. They are thinking about the walk they are on, the game you're playing now, or just relaxing if nothing else is going on. Due to the fact that they are a reactive animal, they deal with every situation with fight/flight/avoidance/acceptance. Now in order to understand what this looks like I'll give you a few examples for each so you can relate to it with your own dog since he's gone through these phases with you.

• Fight- When a dog reacts with fight it doesn't always mean its an all out MMA fight. Have you ever put a leash on an eight week old puppy? They will pull back, bite the leash, go on two feet and put their paws on the leash, alligator roll, and anything else they think of to get the leash off. These are all forms of fight.
  

• Flight- This is pretty easy to see, this is when a dog tries to run away from the situation. The Fourth of July is a great example of this. Unfortunately a lot of dogs run away from their homes on the Fourth of July because the fireworks scare them and they practice flight (running away from the situation).

• Avoidance- This is when your dog tries to act or ignore the situation. An example of this is if you put a muzzle or a cone on a dog and they look down or away and try to act like you or the cone don't exist.

• Acceptance- This is when the dog accepts what is going on and acts normal. This is the goal when you work with a dog, to work them through the other phases all the way to acceptance.

       Just because you worked a dog through his fight phase doesn't mean the fight is over. Some dogs will go from fight to avoidance back to fight back to avoidance many times before finally giving up and going into acceptance. The goal every time is to work the dog to acceptance, this can take 5 minutes or 45 minutes. It is all on the dog's clock not your own. It is important to note that YOU CANNOT FORCE ACCEPTANCE. So putting more pressure on the dog, getting mad, yelling, hitting, etc... won't help you. It will actually hurt you because your dog won't trust you and will want to fight or run away even more from the situation because it is putting an unfair amount of stress on him. The key to achieving acceptance is patience.


       If too much pressure is put on a dog that is nervous, fearful, or anxious, you will force them to result to a fight or flight response, however, if you come with lower intensity and you can properly read the dog you can give him all 4 options rather than forcing him into fight/fight. When a dog goes into fight or flight or even avoidance you need to match their intensity to get their attention and block escalation and get them calm and submissive. So if the dog starts lunging barking snarling at another dog on leash during your walk, your intensity has to match or be higher than his to get his attention and then you need to follow through with body language and energy to get him calm and submissive. If the dog is trying to bolt away from anything you need to block him by matching his intensity with the leash to stop his movement and wait for him to go from flight to avoidance to acceptance. Every dog's sensitivity is different and every owners sensitivity is different so the trick is being able to get the owner to match their dog's intensity and that's where picking the right tool (pet corrector, slip leash, prong collar etc...) comes into play. This is something that is covered in the consultation because I have to see the owner dog match to determine what will work best.